Nate Silver's Blog, page 122

If Pence And Kaine Aren’t The Future Of Their Parties, Who Is?

In this week’s politics chat, we peer into the future. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): I’m sure everyone is excited for tonight’s vice presidential debate! But as world-changing as it is likely to be, we’re going to approach it in a somewhat askew way in this chat. Let’s use tonight’s debate between Mike Pence and Tim Kaine to talk about each party’s bench, i.e., which Republicans are best positioned to carry on the torch if Donald Trump loses in November? Which Democrats can get their party back into the White House in 2020 if Hillary Clinton loses? (BTW, I kinda feel sick to my stomach even talking about 2020.)

Let’s start here, though: Are Pence and Kaine automatically major players in the aftermath of a 2016 loss?

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): When was the last time a losing VP nominee went on to win a presidential nomination? The answer is 1996, when Bob Dole won after losing as Gerald Ford’s running mate in 1976. Of course, Dole also ran for president a number of times unsuccessfully in-between 1976 and 1996. Remember Dan Quayle got crushed when he ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000, after losing in 1992.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I don’t think Kaine or Pence will be major players, is my short answer. Kaine, because he’s too old and not flashy enough (exactly why he was chosen as VP), and Pence because, well, if Trump loses, Pence will be associated with a pretty long losing streak by Republicans. Also, he wasn’t that well liked as governor; his approval rating was at 40 percent in May and even Republican support for his re-election was tepid.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): My answer is that yes, they’ll automatically be big players, unless they don’t want to be.

harry: Why?

micah: DISAGREEMENT!

natesilver: Lack of alternatives?

harry: The Democrats clearly lack a strong bench. This is in large part because Democrats have done horribly in recent midterm elections so there are few major statewide Democratic officials. But Republicans don’t have that problem.

micah: I’m with Clare on this.

clare.malone: No no! I think everyone is going to want to wash the stink of 2016 off their pantsuits once this is done with.

natesilver: The question wasn’t whether 2016 would be an advantage to them. It was whether they’d be major players.

clare.malone: I don’t see them being major players. Let’s take Pence, for example: What ring-kissing sway does he hold after this election? I mean, he’s a guy who was chosen from a pretty substantially narrowed field of candidates — people who would hold their nose and put up with Trump. I just don’t think he has a lot of national appeal post-election. And I haven’t seen much to suggest that he’s a Dick-Cheneyesque inside player.

harry: What is a “major player”?

natesilver: “Major player” isn’t my term, Harry. But I’d say it’s someone who is (i) reasonably likely to run in 2020 or 2024 and (ii) would have a credible chance of winning if they did.

micah: Seems pretty clear to me that if Trump loses Pence will have a really hard time wielding any national influence. Kaine has a better chance.

natesilver: Yeah, but a lot of the Republican candidates ran this year and embarrassed themselves. Has Pence been any more embarrassing than the rest of them?

micah: Not more embarrassing, but more tied to Trump.

harry: And I can name of a ton of Republicans who didn’t run this year, Tom Cotton, Cory Gardner, etc.

clare.malone: Pence is a poor man’s Ted Cruz. Literally, poor — Cruz has a ton of powerful donors.

harry: There’s only so much oxygen in that room.

natesilver: I think Pence could say, “I took one for the team, tried the best I could to control Donald and it could have been a lot worse.” (This argument works much better if the GOP retains the Senate.) He’s basically been competent.

harry: Or forgettable.

clare.malone: But I think he’s more an affable second-stringer than someone who can gin up a lot of support.

Yeah, I’m with Harry.

micah: OK, let’s approach this from the opposite angle: Who’s vying with Pence to lead the queue in 2020? (If you’re keeping score at home, Nate lost the first part of this debate.)

natesilver: Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and possibly also Donald Trump Sr.

clare.malone: I would say lol, but…

natesilver: And Paul Ryan?

micah: No Tiffany?

natesilver: She and Barron are too young.

clare.malone: Don’t you think they’re going to run for some state office first? (The family Trump, that is.)

clare.malone: Poor Tiffany — can I go off track for a moment and say that what I took from that Times profile of her is that Marla Maples seems like a really great mom?

Paul Ryan — 2020 for sure. Front-runner status.

harry: Well, Ryan is interesting. You’d think he’d have been in a great position in 2016, and he didn’t run. I think that speaks to the difficulty of turning an unsuccessful VP bid into a successful presidential campaign.

natesilver: Donald Trump Jr. vs Bill de Blasio?

clare.malone: Ivanka vs. de Blasio. She’s the one New Yorkers would like!

micah: Paul Ryan has a good deal of Trump stink on him, doesn’t he?

natesilver: The whole fucking party either has Trump stink on them, or is probably too moderate to be nominated in the next 4-8 years

micah: Chris Christie is both!

clare.malone: OY.

natesilver: Nikki Haley came out looking OK, I guess.

clare.malone: Does Marco Rubio ever come back? What say you, Nate?

micah: Oh god … here we go …

clare.malone: (Most definitely did this on purpose.)

natesilver: He’s actually surging in South Carolina right now, if you look carefully. I think he can still win the nomination.

micah: Who’s more likely to make a comeback, Cruz or Rubio?

natesilver: A comeback or a successful comeback?

clare.malone: Hmmm. Rubio.

natesilver: Let’s take them one at a time.

micah: Cruz.

clare.malone: Dissent!

micah: OK, let’s take Rubio…

harry: What I think we’ll see, in all seriousness, is a Republican Party that realizes it cannot sit on the sidelines. The party will move to coronate a nominee rather quickly. If that happens, Rubio is in a better position for a comeback than Cruz.

micah: What Republican Party?

natesilver: Rubio’s numbers are holding up pretty well in that U.S. Senate race in Florida, albeit against a weak opponent. And he’s a guy with some political talent, who was sort of harmed this year by mismanaging the expectations game. The problem is that there’s not that big a market for what he’s selling.

micah: What makes you say he has political talent?

clare.malone: He’s relatively telegenic and knows how to spin a good personal yarn. Make no mistake about that.

micah: IDK, I don’t think he has the “it” factor other politicians do … and he’s really in a mold of pol where you need that.

natesilver: But Cruz has the “it” factor? Did you mean to say ick factor?

micah: No, but Cruz has a base.

harry: Cruz performed marginally better than Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.

micah: If you don’t have a base, you’d better be able to light up a room.

clare.malone: So what the Republicans need to do is genetically engineer a likable Ted Cruz?

micah: Yes.

natesilver: Cruz didn’t have enough of a base to come all that close to Trump, even with a good team around him and a lot of things that broke in his favor.

clare.malone: What about someone like Ben Sasse? Wild card? He’s really interesting — definitely as smart as Cruz, a bit of an independent streak.

micah: I’d buy Sasse stock.

harry: That’s where I’m looking. I think it’s probably best to put this year in the past and go with someone new, and Republicans have plenty of shiny objects like Sasse.

clare.malone: He’s got outsider credibility, too.

natesilver: My worry with Sasse is that, after a Trump loss, the GOP will be in too much chaos for someone without a national brand name to build themselves up.

clare.malone: That’s a fair point, Nate.

natesilver: His name recognition nationally is like, what, 15 percent.

clare.malone: Yeah, it’s not great: 69 percent of Republicans had never heard of Sasse in June.

micah: Susana Martinez?

harry: Too moderate, in my opinion.

micah: Actually, if I were betting, I’d bet on Haley.

natesilver: I’d probably still bet on Ryan.

harry: I went to YouGov, by the way, to find out something about Sasse. I didn’t find a poll, but I did find these comments:

Suggests that any outsider who was deemed as unfriendly to Trump may have some problems.

clare.malone: Yeah, that’s going to be a problem — that’s why Cruz rolled down the hill from his moral high ground; he realized people wanted to see a “team player” if he ever ran for high office again.

harry: The question, as yet unknown, is whether the Republican Party of 2020 will be a pro-Trump or anti-Trump party. How will his candidacy be viewed? I don’t know the answer.

clare.malone: It’s going to be pro-Trump sentiment, I think. Not on demeanor, perhaps, but there’s a hunger at the base for anti-establishment, anti-immigration policies. These are real things. Add to the immigration stew the threat of the Islamic State, and you’ve got some juice to keep people coming out for these things on the ballot.

micah: Agreed.

Any other Republicans worth mentioning before we move to the Democrats? Rick Perry?

clare.malone: “Dancing With the Stars” was a very strong career move.

natesilver: I think we haven’t spent enough time on Ryan! I mean, Ryan has kind of a shitty job right now. Whether Trump wins or loses, it’s not going to be easy to lead that party from the House. So he might be ready to go White House or bust by 2020.

harry: So mark it down: Nate Silver says Paul Ryan will be president in 2021.

micah: But won’t the intervening years saddle Ryan with a ton of baggage? He’ll have to anger someone.

clare.malone: He might draw the ire of the Freedom Caucus, for starters.

natesilver: Republicans can unite around him in their hatred of Clinton.

micah: That’s true — a President Clinton will be a unifying force.

natesilver: That’s the one sure thing.

clare.malone: We’ve forgotten about the obstinate factions in our Congress momentarily, but they are very real! And ideological, which sometimes makes for an unwillingness to rally round the campfire.

natesilver: I also think, by the way, that Trumpism will be more discredited than not if Trump loses. It’s really hard on a party to lose three presidential elections in a row.

micah: OK, the Democrats …

clare.malone: Kirsten Gillibrand

micah: Elizabeth Warren

clare.malone: Too old. Next.

natesilver: I think we need to pause for breath here, though, and recognize that it’ll be total armageddon on the Democratic side if Clinton loses. Total. Chaos. “Lord of the Flies” shit.

clare.malone: Heard it here first, folks.

micah: Yeah, holding the White House has kinda covered up the fact that Democrats control very little in the states. If Trump wins, they’ll be shut out almost everywhere!

harry: If the Democrats cannot beat Donald John Trump, they’ll have all sorts of problems.

natesilver: Here’s my dark-horse candidate. You ready?

clare.malone: CLAY AIKEN??

natesilver: It’s someone from the Midwest who does NOT currently hold elected office. Any guesses?

clare.malone: Dan Gilbert.

harry: Michelle Obama.

natesilver: R-U-S-S-F-E-I-N-G-O-L-D-2-0-2-0

Bang!

Russ Feingold

harry: Possible.

micah: Make the case.

natesilver: He’s like Bernie Sanders, but younger and from a swing state, and with better relations with his colleagues and the Democratic establishment. And he’s probably going to win that U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin.

harry: FYI, Russ Feingold will be 67 years old in four years. He’s not that much younger than Sanders.

natesilver: Sanders will be 79 four years from now. Warren will be 71.

clare.malone: Guys, this is the Democrats’ problem — they cannot think young! Why is no one grooming talent??

harry: So why is Warren old when Feingold is young?

clare.malone: They’re both old.

harry: Right.

natesilver: I mean, Warren is a possibility, too, obviously. It’s never quite been clear how interested she is in the job, though.

clare.malone: I find her not all that talented on the stump. She’s better in the righteous anger mode in the Senate. Or on Twitter.

natesilver: Her convention speech was kind of a dud. But she’d raise a ton of money and build up a very good organization. And she’s good at needling Trump.

harry: How about Chris Murphy? Cory Booker? Kamala Harris?

natesilver: Too establishment, probably.

clare.malone: Julian Castro?

natesilver: I don’t know, I guess I have the strong intuition that the left will feel like it’s their turn in 2020 if Clinton blows the race, and will probably get their way.

micah: Al Franken.

natesilver: Maybe?

micah: Tim Kaine?

clare.malone: Again, it’s crazy that these people are all of a particular generation.

This feels very tired — the same old names. Interesting that there’s no one younger on the left that we’re thinking of as a Bernie replacement.

harry: Who would that be? Tammy Baldwin?

clare.malone: Dunno that it exists, Harry. Guess that’s what I’m saying — it’s interesting! All the young Democrats are so establishment, straight edge.

micah: How often does someone just come out of nowhere? Has anyone ever gone from total obscurity to the nomination in four years?

harry: Barack Obama, sorta.

natesilver: I feel like if Clinton loses in 2020, it’s either going to be a well-known left-y politician or someone who does come out of nowhere, and that the in-between is kind of a bad space to occupy.

clare.malone: Sherrod Brown.

natesilver: Are there any Democratic Senate candidates who have really overperformed this year? Maybe Jason Kander in Missouri?

Brown is a very plausible nominee, BTW.

clare.malone: Kander is certainly interesting — doing well in a red state, military background, young.

harry: Brown, who will be 67 in 2020.

micah: Did you all see Philip Bump’s VP debate quiz?

clare.malone: The Times has one, too.

micah: Bump’s is waaaay better.

Final thoughts? Who’s gonna win tonight?

clare.malone: Americans might win by hearing some actual policy stances?

harry: The people watching the AL wild card game.

Fully expect this to break out tonight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq734_nZ7Eo

natesilver: 34 more days, Micah. 34 more days.

Election Update: How Big Is Hillary Clinton’s Lead?

Here’s what we know: Hillary Clinton is leading in the race for president, and she’s made meaningful gains since last week’s presidential debate. Clinton is currently a 72 percent favorite in our polls-only forecast, up from 55 percent just before the debate. That corresponds to a roughly 4-percentage-point national lead for Clinton, about where the race was as of Labor Day — before a series of mishaps for her in mid-September. Our polls-plus model, which blends polls with an economic index and generally produces a more conservative forecast, has Clinton with a 69 percent chance instead.

But don’t take our model’s word for it: Take a look at the polls for yourself. In the chart below, I’ve shown every swing state poll taken from the start of Clinton’s “bad weekend” on Sept. 10, through Sept. 25, the day before the debate — a rough stretch of polling for her. I’ve also shown every swing state poll taken since the debate was completed.

This makes for a pretty darned clear difference. In the set of pre-debate polls, Clinton was barely ahead. Out of 67 polls, she led in 34, trailed in 29 and was tied with Trump in four. That’s why our model had Trump drawing the Electoral College almost — but not quite — to a tie before the debate. We had a lot of data, much of it from high-quality pollsters. Clinton’s leads in potentially must-win states, such as Pennsylvania and Colorado, were tenuous. And she wasn’t clearly ahead anywhere else, although Florida and North Carolina were tossups. It wasn’t quite enough to make Clinton an underdog, but it was getting close.

But Clinton’s advantage in the post-debate data is just as clear. Out of 20 post-debate polls in swing states, she’s led in 18, trailed in only one (today’s Quinnipiac poll of Ohio) and was tied in one other. Overall, the post-debate polls look a lot like the results that President Obama had against Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, although with Ohio and North Carolina flipping sides. (Iowa is a good candidate for Trump also, but it hasn’t been polled since the debate.) That isn’t a coincidence, since Obama beat Romney by 3.9 percentage points in 2012 — right about where our model has the Clinton-Trump gap now.

To be clear, our model uses a more complex process than this to make its forecasts, one that relies heavily on intra-poll trend lines. (Did Clinton gain or lose ground from the previous version of the same poll?). But it’s almost always reassuring when a complex process produces about the same answer as a simple one.

Speaking of trend lines, I’d remind you to be careful when examining them. Our model’s hypothesis is that Clinton has gained 2 to 3 percentage points since just before the debate, possibly with some upside on top of that based on events since the debate. Coming late in a close race, those 2 or 3 points are enough to improve Clinton’s odds quite a bit. (Think of an NBA team that sinks a clutch basket to go from a 2-point lead to a 4-point lead late in the game; its win probability improves a lot.) But Clinton’s post-debate gains are also not on the order of her convention bounce, which was something like 8 points instead — large enough to show up in almost every poll. Thus, you can find some polls where Clinton has gained as many as 7 points since the debate, but others where she hasn’t moved up at all — and even one or two where she’s lost ground. All of this is pretty normal.

If you’re comparing new results to polls from further back in time, you have to be more careful still. As I mentioned, for instance, the race looks about like it did on Labor Day. Thus, if a pollster last surveyed the race then, you probably wouldn’t expect much of a bounce for Clinton.

Certain polls are also “bouncier” than others. As a general rule — there are exceptions — traditional telephone polls show more movement than online or automated polls. Those traditional phone polls had some of Clinton’s worst numbers pre-debate, but they tend to show some of her best results now.

Although there was a small flood of polling data late Monday afternoon, polling was sparse late last week and into the weekend. Thus, we don’t know as much about whether Clinton is still gaining ground or whether her post-debate bounce has peaked or even begun to decline. Our now-cast, however, which weights recent data more heavily, shows Clinton with a slightly larger lead (4.6 percentage points) than the polls-only model (3.8 points). That suggests she probably has more upside than downside, especially given that Trump has had a terrible series of news cycles that may not yet be fully accounted for by the polls. The best evidence against Clinton still gaining ground is probably from the various daily tracking polls, which mostly haven’t shown Clinton’s position improving over the course of the past several days.

All of this detail might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s important. If Trump manages to keep his deficit to 3 or 4 points heading into the second presidential debate on Sunday, his probability of a comeback will be a lot better than if he’s down by something like 5 or 6 points instead. In recent elections, we’ve seen several shifts of 3 or 4 points late in the race, but not many of a larger magnitude than that. That’s not to say Trump’s position would become impossible. But in order to lose the race, Clinton might need multiple things to go wrong (say, a bad second or third debate and a disappointing turnout on Election Day) instead of just one — which puts her in a much safer position today.

The Tax-Returns Story May Eat Up Precious Time For Trump

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The 2016 presidential election has its first October surprise: several pages of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns. In the latest FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast, the crew considers what effects the tax revelations might have on the final month of the campaign. The tax returns suggest that Trump may have paid little to no federal income taxes for years — a notion already widely discussed — but Nate Silver suggests that the story inherently hurts Trump by taking up time he needs to stage a comeback.

The team also unpacks the past week’s polls and previews Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.

Also, the podcast has two upcoming live shows: in Chicago on Oct. 7 and New York on Oct. 24.

Check back soon for a partial transcription of the conversation.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling"? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Election Update: The Craziest End To The 2016 Campaign Runs Through New Mexico

This weekend was a letdown for those of us hoping for new, high-quality national polls to test how last week’s debate affected the campaign. The only new national polls we received were updates to the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times and UPI/CVoter tracking polls, both of which have actually moved slightly toward Donald Trump, but they still contain a mix of pre-debate and post-debate data. Meanwhile, an ABC News/Washington Post poll showed Hillary Clinton expanding her favorability rating gap with Trump — her numbers are bad, but his numbers are worse. But that poll apparently didn’t actually ask respondents who they were voting for.

So forecast-wise, we’re in the same place that we were on Friday: It’s pretty clear that the debate helped Clinton, but there’s some doubt about the magnitude of her bounce. It’s plausible that she’s gained only 1 or 2 percentage points, increasing her lead over Trump to about 3 points overall. That’s what our models have accounted for so far, enough to make her a 67 percent favorite according to our polls-only forecast and a 64 percent favorite according to polls-plus. Or her bounce could prove to be larger than that, especially given that Trump has woken up to — or stayed up all night tweeting about — a host of bad stories in the week since the debate.

There was one poll that caught our eye, though, and it was from New Mexico. The survey, from Research & Polling Inc. for the Albuquerque Journal, showed a competitive three-way matchup, with Clinton at 35 percent, Trump at 31 percent, and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson at 24 percent. Because New Mexico hasn’t been polled much, the survey had a fair amount of influence on our forecast, reducing Clinton’s chances of winning New Mexico to 82 percent from 85 percent in the polls-only model.

Most of the time, Trump would be the beneficiary of a Clinton loss in New Mexico. But the model also assigns Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, an outside chance — 2 or 3 percent — of winning the state. That could lead to an Electoral College deadlock that looks like this:

In this map, via 270towin.com, Clinton has 267 electoral votes, Trump has 266, and Johnson has New Mexico’s five. With no candidate possessing an Electoral College majority, the election would go to the House of Representatives, with Clinton, Trump and Johnson all eligible to receive votes.

Each candidate might be able to make a claim to legitimacy, of sorts. Trump might argue that the outcome showed that voters had profoundly rejected the status quo — and what could be a bigger rejection of the status quo than a President Trump? But more importantly, he’d have a sympathetic audience, since Republicans are likely to control the majority of congressional delegations. Clinton would probably have won the popular vote in this scenario, since she’s more likely to win the popular vote while losing the Electoral College than the other way around, according to our forecast. And Johnson might try to position himself as some sort of compromise choice.

It’s a somewhat plausible map too, with Clinton winning all her “must-win” states except New Mexico, which she loses because of Johnson’s native-son status. In the Albuquerque Journal’s poll, Clinton led Trump by 10 percentage points in a two-way matchup — about what you’d expect in New Mexico given the state’s demographics. But the poll showed Johnson (and Green Party nominee Jill Stein) taking disproportionately from Clinton’s support instead of Trump’s.

But plausible is a long way from likely. It’s not far-fetched to think the Electoral College would be close enough that New Mexico would make the difference, and it’s not totally crazy to think that Johnson could win his home state. But for both to occur together is quite a parlay. In 20,000 simulations of our polls-only model this morning, cases in which neither Clinton nor Trump received a majority of electoral votes and Johnson received at least one came up just 30 times, putting the chances at 0.15 percent. Most of those did involve Johnson winning New Mexico, sometimes along with Alaska (probably his second-best state).

A somewhat more common deadlock scenario is Trump and Clinton each getting 269 electoral votes without Johnson getting any. The chances of that are about 0.4 percent.

Election Update: Clinton’s Debate Performance Is Helping Her In Swing States

National polls conducted since Monday’s presidential debate have shown Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump by an average of about 4 percentage points — a meaningful improvement from her position before the debate, when she led by just 1 or 2 points. Now, it’s becoming clearer that battleground state polls are moving toward Clinton as well. These include the first results since the debate from high-quality, live-caller telephone polls; the numbers we’d been getting earlier this week were all from online or automated polls.

Here’s what I wrote on Thursday about what we might expect to see in swing state polls, assuming that Clinton led Trump by 3 to 5 percentage points nationally, as national polls seem to show:

A 4- to 8-point lead in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Michigan, which have been slightly bluer than the national average this cycle.Somewhere between a tie and a 4-point Clinton lead in Florida and North Carolina, which have been slightly redder than the national average.A roughly tied race in Ohio and Iowa, which have been significantly redder than the national average.

So, what data have we gotten since then?

In New Hampshire, a MassINC Polling Group poll (live caller) had Clinton up by 7 points.In Michigan, a Glengariff Group poll (live caller) had Clinton up by 7 points.In Florida, a Mason-Dixon poll (live caller) had Clinton up by 4 points.Also in Florida, an Opinion Savvy poll (conducted by automated telephone and online) had the race essentially tied (Clinton up by 0.3 points).And finally, in Nevada, a Suffolk University poll (live caller) had Clinton ahead by 6 points.

As you can see, these results are pretty much exactly what we’d expect with a Clinton lead of 3 to 5 percentage points nationally. In fact, they’re mostly toward the high end of the range, which means that her lead over Trump nationally could eventually turn out to be more like 5 points than 3 points as more data comes in.

The most impressive result for Clinton is probably the Suffolk poll of Nevada. I didn’t establish a benchmark for Nevada in Thursday’s write-up because there’s been a divergence between polls and demographics there all cycle, with polls showing it as a Trump-leaning state while demographics imply it should remain Democratic. But her 6-point lead in the Suffolk poll — the largest lead she’s had in any live-caller poll in Nevada all year — is the sort of number our model was expecting to see there all along. As a caution, Suffolk’s sample sizes are on the smaller side (500 people) so we’ll need to see more data from the Silver State.

Still, the polls have told a pretty consistent story overall. Among the 11 swing state polls conducted since the debate, Clinton has led in all 11.

You may notice that I’ve focused on the top line numbers (“Clinton’s up by 4”) instead of trend lines (“she’s gained 2 points”) in these last couple of updates, because with trend lines there’s more to keep track of. The period from Sept. 11 through the Sept. 26 debate was one of Clinton’s worst polling stretches of the year, for example, so a new survey from a pollster that last tested the race in that period will probably show Clinton gaining ground since then. But if a pollster had last surveyed a state in early August, when she was up by 7 or 8 percentage points nationally, you’d still expect Clinton to lose ground since then.

Our models keeps track of all this stuff, of course, although they may not yet have Clinton’s debate bounce fully priced in. Her chances of winning have risen to 67 percent in our polls-only model and 64 percent in polls-plus. But our hyper-aggressive now-cast has Clinton’s popular vote lead at 4.1 percentage points, as compared with 3.1 points in the polls-only model. Since the now-cast doesn’t need as much data to show a big change, the gap implies that Clinton has some further room to grow in polls-plus and polls-only if we get more polls confirming the results we’ve seen over the past couple days.

The FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast covers the twists and turns of the election each week. Subscribe on iTunes or listen online.

Election Update: Even A Small Post-Debate Bounce Could Make A Big Difference For Clinton

Like a lot of you, we at FiveThirtyEight are spending a lot of time refreshing our web browsers and Twitter feeds as we await new polls. Until we get more of those, figuring out how the first presidential debate affected the race involves a lot of guesswork. Still, the data that we have so far suggests that Hillary Clinton has gained ground as a result of Monday night’s debate — it’s mostly a question of how much her position has improved.

Four national polls have been conducted entirely since the debate: They have Clinton ahead of Donald Trump by 5 percentage points, 4 points, 3 points and 1 point. There’s also a new national tracking poll from the New Orleans Times-Picayune conducted mostly since the debate, and that has Clinton up 5 points. Considering that the 1-point lead was from Rasmussen Reports, which typically produces Republican-leaning results, the polls show a reasonably clear consensus so far of Clinton being up by 3 to 5 points nationally.

If that’s where the numbers wind up settling, that would reflect a meaningful bounce for Clinton, who was ahead by just 1 or 2 points nationally before the debate and in a tenuous position in key Electoral College states, such as Pennsylvania and Colorado.

The map starts to look a lot safer for Clinton if she’s up by 3 to 5 points instead. Take, for example, this post-debate round of battleground state polls from Public Policy Polling, which has Clinton up by 6 points in Pennsylvania, Colorado and Virginia, and up by 2 points in Florida and North Carolina. Those polls generated some oohing and ahhing on Twitter when they were published this morning, but they’re pretty much exactly what you’d expect to see in a race that Clinton leads by 4 points nationally, which is where PPP has the national race.

To generalize this a bit further, with a 3-to-5-point lead nationally for Clinton, we’d expect to see the following in the swing states:

A 4-to-8-point lead in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Michigan, which have been slightly bluer than the national average this cycle.Somewhere between a tie and a 4-point Clinton lead in Florida and North Carolina, which have been slightly redder than the national average.A roughly tied race in Ohio and Iowa, which have been significantly redder than the national average.

I’m leaving aside a few states where there’s been a conflict between the polls and the demographics. In Nevada, for example, polls have been pretty good for Trump throughout this cycle, but it’s a hard state to poll, and I’m not sure how much I’d infer about the national race from how Nevada is moving. It also wouldn’t surprise me if some of the fringier swing states, such as Maine, Minnesota, Arizona and Georgia, move back in their usual partisan directions over the final weeks of the campaign. None of it matters much because with a 3-to-5-point lead, Clinton would have lots of ways to win in the Electoral College, and she could also tolerate underperforming her polls somewhat on Election Day. With a 1- or 2-point lead, by contrast, she’d have very little margin for error.

Of course, as I said at the outset, that 3-to-5-point range is just an educated guess based on the numbers we’ve seen so far and how past debates have moved the polls. Almost all the data we’ve gotten so far is from online polls and automated phone polls. Traditional telephone polls usually like to spend several days conducting interviews instead of turning polls around overnight. We should start to see some of those high-quality live-interviewer polls this weekend, and they may tell a different story than the quick-turnaround polls do.

Our forecast models could also take a few more days to catch up to whatever bounce Clinton has or doesn’t have. So far, she’s gained about 1 percentage point over Trump in the polls-only model, going from a 1.5-point lead in the projected popular vote before the debate to a 2.7-point lead now. Even that relatively small change has been enough to improve her chances of winning to 63 percent, up from 55 percent before the debate.

Clinton’s gains have been larger in the now-cast, a projection of what would happen in a hypothetical election held today. We’ve been de-emphasizing the now-cast because we find that people mistake it for an Election Day forecast, but it can be useful at times like these when you suspect some recent news event will affect the race and you want to see a projection that’s more aggressive about responding to that. Clinton currently has a 3.6-point lead over Trump in the now-cast.

Election Update: Early Polls Suggest A Post-Debate Bounce For Clinton

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Every scientific poll we’ve encountered so far suggests that voters thought Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in Monday night’s debate. In fact, some of them showed her winning by a wide margin — wide enough to make it a good bet (though not a guarantee) that she’ll gain in horse-race polls against Trump over the next week or so.

But so far, we’ve seen just two polls released that tested Clinton’s standing against Trump after the debate. They have pretty good news for Clinton, but I’d recommend some caution until we get more data.

The first poll is from Morning Consult, which shows Clinton leading by 3 percentage points in a matchup that includes third-party candidates — that’s a 4-point swing toward Clinton from the 1-point Trump lead that Morning Consult showed before the debate. In a head-to-head matchup against Trump, Clinton leads by 4 points, up from a 2-point lead before the debate.

The other survey is from Echelon Insights, and it shows Clinton leading Trump by 5 percentage points. In theory, that would be consistent with a bounce for Clinton, since she led Trump by just 1 to 2 points overall before the debate, based on FiveThirtyEight’s projection. But it’s hard to know for sure because Echelon has surveyed the race only once before — just after the Republican convention, when they showed Clinton leading Trump by 1 point.

Apart from these polls, the only other data we have is from the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times and UPI/CVOTER national tracking polls, but I’d discourage people from paying very much attention to them. It’s nothing against the polls themselves — in fact, I’ve defended the USC/LA Times poll’s methodology in the past — it’s just a matter of timing. Each poll uses a 7-day field period, which means that only about one-seventh of their interviews were conducted after the debate. I’d wait a couple of days before making too much of these surveys — until they consist mostly of post-debate interviews.

There are other reasons to be cautious, too. Polls conducted over a one- or two-day period, like the Morning Consult and Echelon Insights polls, can suffer from low response rates, since the pollsters won’t have time to recontact voters who they missed the first time around. That could plausibly bias the poll toward whichever candidate has the most enthusiastic supporters at the time of the poll, making it less representative. Many traditional pollsters prefer their polls to be in the field for three or four days, and we won’t see any results from polls like those until Friday at the soonest.

Another complication is that it can be hard to separate voters’ reaction to the debate itself from their reaction to the media’s reaction to the debate. By that I mean: Clinton has had some tough news cycles lately, so getting some better headlines could help her, and that could plausibly also affect the polls. Or maybe not, since Trump has a knack for turning the news cycle on its head.

One last admonition: When evaluating a post-debate bounce, consider whether the poll was an outlier before. For instance, the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed Clinton ahead by 6 percentage points nationally, on the high end of her range heading into the debate. By contrast, the most recent Rasmussen Reports poll had Clinton trailing Trump by 5 points. Clinton is more likely to improve her numbers in the next Rasmussen poll than in the next NBC poll, but that could reflect reversion to the mean as much as a debate bounce.

Overall, there are some tentatively positive signs for Clinton — but not more than that, yet. At the moment, our polls-only model shows Clinton with a 58 percent chance of winning; polls-plus shows her with a 56 percent chance. But our forecast models don’t make any special assumptions about the debate, and they’ll take several days to catch up to whatever impact it has or hasn’t had. You can track the latest polls as they’re added to the model here.

What Could The Polls Be Missing?

In this week’s politics chat, we weighed reasons the polls could be underestimating Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): The first presidential debate is behind us, and by most metrics, Hillary Clinton had the better night. But we’ll have to wait a few days to see how/whether the polls move as a result. So, in the meantime, I’d like us to ponder the road ahead. Specifically, whether there are factors not captured by the polls that will help Trump or Clinton.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Did you see the Drudge poll? Trump won 80-20.

micah: I don’t trust the Drudge poll; I always go to the Patch poll first.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I like to ask my cab drivers what they thought.

natesilver: I’m a big fan of the Pravda.ru poll, but it’s a little Trump-leaning. The raw numbers were 99-1 Trump, but our model adjusts it to 97-3.

micah: Anyway, the goal here is to consider factors that might be working in either candidate’s favor that the polls are missing.

clare.malone: Astrological signs.

micah: So, let’s run through some.

Hypothesis #1: The polls are underestimating Clinton because they don’t factor in her superior ground game.

Most reports (and we’ll have an article with some extensive data on this soon) suggest that Clinton is far better organized than Trump, with more field offices, for example, and a better get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation. Isn’t that reason to think the polls are underestimating Clinton by a bit?

natesilver: That’s one of the better arguments, yeah.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Well, the question you have to ask yourself is whether or not the field game is being picked up by the polls. In a wonderful, perfect universe, it would be. In reality, I have my doubts. That’s why I’m not entirely sold on polls showing a large gap (in Trump’s favor) between registered voter results and likely voter results.

natesilver: The empirical literature on the ground game is messy because there are so many conflating variables. But what would worry me if I were Trump is that the race isn’t that close if everyone turns out — and I have the worse turnout operation.

micah: How would the polls pick up on a better ground game?

harry: A ground game is supposed to get people to vote. So, if Clinton’s campaign is getting more people engaged, then polls that are aimed at identifying likely voters should pick up on that. More of those voters should make it through the likely voter screen.

natesilver: Well, maybe they’ll make it through the likely voter screen, but a lot of likely voter screens rely on past voting history, and may or may not have adequate provisions in place to capture new voters.

harry: Right.

natesilver: Also, a lot of likely voter screens do something that’s probably dumb, which is to set a hard cut-off for voting propensity instead of doing it probabilistically. Clinton has a “long tail” of semi-likely voters that she could potentially draw from.

harry: Also correct.

micah: Clare, have you seen evidence of a superior Clinton ground game on your travels?

clare.malone: Clinton and the Democrats certainly have a more traditional, organized field operation. This is not to say that Trump doesn’t have some of the basics — the campaign has, for instance, phone-banking apps that their volunteers can use from home, along with walking apps for door-to-door stuff. But Trump is still substantively relying on the Republican National Committee’s operation, and they’ve been suffering from a lack of enthusiasm in some of the management-level types who usually run campaigns.

I would say Trump is still mostly counting on his earned media strategy.

We also know that the Trump team is trying to turn out people who DON’T usually vote, and who probably don’t answer polls.

micah: So Clare, couldn’t Trump’s reliance on the RNC for GOTV hurt him? Down-ballot Republicans might want to turn out slightly different voters than Trump would want.

harry: We saw very little proof during the primaries that Trump turned out untraditional voters.

clare.malone: Right. I think the RNC is a little nervous that Trump people might not vote Republican all the way down ticket, so in some of their door-to-door activities, they might be targeting the more traditional Republicans who are turned off by the presidential race. I.e., looking to target some college-educated whites for Senate races in key states.

natesilver: Yeah, Trump’s performance was pretty meh against the polls in the primaries. And he didn’t do a good job of winning over late-deciding voters, although that’s a slightly different issue than not having a good turnout operation.

harry: Well, we have more evidence than just the polls. We have Catalist data on who turned out to vote: Most Trump primary voters also turned out in the 2012 general election. The only candidate who had a large share of untraditional voters was Bernie Sanders.

micah: OK, so… Clinton could add 20 percentage points to her margin over Trump thanks to a superior GOTV operation?

clare.malone: 20 points seems like quite a lot.

harry: We’re looking at, at most, a few percentage points. It could add maybe a point or two to Clinton’s margin.

micah: NEXT!

clare.malone: ASTROLOGICAL SIGNS.

Trump is a Gemini, Clinton’s a Scorpio. I invite readers to tell me what that means and I will spin that shit into golden analysis.

harry: What is a Gemini?

natesilver: This is the dawning of the Age of Trumparius

micah:

Hypothesis #2: The polls are underestimating Trump because of shy Trump voters.

We’ve covered this a bit, so let’s do it quickly, but the argument is that there’s a social stigma in some areas attached to supporting Trump, so the polls are underestimating his support because some of his supporters are unwilling to say they back him.

Any takers?

harry: It is quite funny to think Trump supporters are shy when they all seem to take the time to vote in these stupid non-scientific online polls after debates.

clare.malone: In the primaries Trump voters weren’t shy, were they? Does that change for the general?

harry: Right, there is no proof they were shy in the primaries. Moreover, Trump supporters are more likely than Clinton voters to make it through the likely voter screens, indicating they are more vocal and enthusiastic in their support. The polls could still underestimate Trump, but they could also underestimate Clinton.

natesilver: In the abstract, it’s a plausible theory. There’s a fair bit of evidence on the impact of social desirability bias. I just don’t know if it fits the facts of the case all that well. Trump voters aren’t shy, for one thing. They’re actually more demonstrative than Clinton voters, in many, many respects.

clare.malone: They’re huggers, you mean?

natesilver: The original “shy” term comes from “shy Tories,” and the idea was that British voters didn’t want to admit to voting for a party that was plodding and un-hip, or at least they were less enthusiastic about responding to pollsters.

So that sounds more like Clinton’s voters than Trump’s, if anything.

The social desirability idea is a separate one that’s sort of gotten lumped together with it. It’s a plausible idea, but “shy Trump” probably isn’t a good name for it. Instead, it’s more like the Bradley Effect.

harry: You know I heard of this one before. I heard it back in 1991, when David Duke was running for governor of Louisiana. Pollsters were all concerned that white voters were afraid to admit they were voting for the former KKK member. Did the polls underestimate Duke? Actually, they overestimated him. The polls underestimated the opposition to Duke from black voters who turned out in large numbers to vote against him.

clare.malone: It seems unlikely to me that there are a lot of shy Trumps, if only because I think he’s become pretty normalized now.

micah: Totally agree ^^^.

clare.malone: If you’re a Republican in a swing state who’s on the fence, for instance, you can say you don’t like the guy, but stand behind the protection of “I care about Supreme Court nominees.” That’s where we are these days.

natesilver: One more thought on shy Trump and social desirability: Pollsters sometimes try to get around asking people sensitive questions by asking about how their neighbors behave. They’ll ask “are people in your community against interracial marriage” for instance, instead of asking directly about the respondent’s view.

What’s interesting is that if you ask voters who they think is going to win the election, Clinton does very well on that question (although less so lately).

clare.malone: That has always seemed like a really weird way to do it, to me at least. It just seems really fraught. What if you hate your neighbors?!

harry: I don’t even know my neighbors.

micah: NEXT!

Hypothesis #3: The polls are underestimating Clinton because she has a lot more money than Trump and will blitz the airwaves in the last few weeks of the campaign.

harry: I don’t buy this one. If the ads were working so well and could blow Trump out of the water, then why isn’t she crushing him yet? She has already been outspending him by a ton.

micah: But maybe people are only tuning in now?

clare.malone: The ad stuff is so hard for me to tell what’s happening — maybe we are reaching the end of an era of effective television ads, right?

I think the best ones she’s had are the ones with little kids listening to all the terrible things Trump says, that kind of thing strikes me as persuasive to people.

harry: I’m not saying ads do or don’t work. I’m just saying we shouldn’t expect them to start working in ways they haven’t so far. At least not to so great a degree to cause a large polling miss.

clare.malone: That’s fair enough.

micah: Do ads work?

natesilver: In down-ballot races, sure — but the impact of ads is pretty minor as compared to the amount of free media that these candidates are getting.

clare.malone: Mentos ads definitely worked on me in my teen years.

micah: Back-to-school ads worked on me for sure. I used to think, “If I only had that cool backpack, I’d be popular.” Or that awesome pencil case.

clare.malone: Those still work on me. I want a pair of saddle shoes every Sept. 1.

[Stage note: Now we’re all talking about how many shoes we own.]

natesilver: One thought, btw, is that maybe Clinton could use her ads to try to improve her favorables instead of trying to tear down Trump. The negative attacks tend to get a lot more amplification from the media, so perhaps there’s less need to advertise on that basis.

micah: I agree with that. She should go all self-promotion.

Hypothesis #4 (and this one I buy): The polls are underestimating Clinton because the remaining set pieces of the campaign — the things we know will happen — play to Clinton’s strengths, all else being equal. The remaining debates, mostly.

So Clinton is running slightly downhill from here on out.

natesilver: That metaphor is confusing! It’s like positive and negative feedback!

Negative feedbacks are usually good — they keep us all from frying or freezing to death, for instance!

micah: She’s running slightly downhill so her polls are more likely to go up. What’s so confusing about that?

clare.malone: I would agree that she does better in forums where she can showcase her competence. I think the next debate, which is a town hall, will be really interesting — seeing Clinton/Trump interact with voters.

natesilver: Obviously (?) there are two theories about the remaining debates. One is that Trump will benefit from even lower expectations and/or Clinton complacency. He can’t help but be a little better, right?

The other theory is that Trump is arrogant enough to think he can win debates without preparing for them — and will use those Drudge polls to convince himself that he actually won last night!

micah: BTW: Clare said a while ago that she thought the debates would clearly be good for Clinton because they would necessarily showcase her competence, and I was skeptical just because debates can be so focused on performance. So I just want to say for the record: Clare was right, at least about debate No. 1.

natesilver: One way to put it is that Clinton is good with the set-pieces of the campaign, while Trump excels in open play — the random chaos of the day-to-day.

harry: The thing that was so funny about that first debate is that people had convinced themselves that Clinton and Trump were on mostly equal ground heading in. The share of people who expected Clinton to win was right near the lower end of what we’ve seen historically. What I’m interested in is whether or not people might convince themselves again that Trump will somehow do better. The question I have to ask is why?! What has he done to make us believe that he can improve?

natesilver: Another question is whether there’s time for a Clinton comeback narrative, and then a Trump comeback narrative, to the extent that the media framing of these things matters.

Basically what’s happened so far:

May was good for Trump.June was good for Clinton.July was good for Trump.August was good for Clinton.September was good for Trump.

It looks as though — maybe, maybe — October might be good for Clinton. Is there time for November to be good for Trump, or does it not count because it’s not a full month? [Editor’s Note: It’s eight days.]

clare.malone: hah #datajournalism

micah: Last one!

clare.malone: Mercury in retrograde??

harry: I prefer Pluto. (It’s still a planet.)

micah:

Hypothesis No. 5: The polls are underestimating ______ because _______.

This is for wildcards! Wikileaks! Clinton’s better surrogates. An economic recession. What else could matter?

natesilver: There’s not much chance of a recession now. Or at least, if there was one, it wouldn’t be declared until after the election. But y’all haven’t heard my self-reinforcing financial panic theory, have you?

harry: No, but I’m sure you’ll tell us.

clare.malone: Regale us.

natesilver: It goes like this: Financial markets start to panic because they worry about a Trump presidency. The panic makes a Trump presidency more likely. Vicious cycle. President Trump!

clare.malone: That seems … not likely.

harry: What a theory.

clare.malone: But on the other hand, I graduated right as the financial crisis hit, so part of me is letting that sink in and panicking — what if I never get a job?? I’m an English major, for god’s sake!

Wikileaks is a good wildcard, by the by. They’ve been eerily silent over the past two months.

harry: I tend to doubt anything is going to happen.

natesilver: I dunno. I think Wikileaks has shown that its judgment about what’s actually newsworthy or not is suspect. Lots of false alarms.

clare.malone: Still think that Wikileaks and terror attacks (god forbid) are the deus-ex-machina possible actors in this election.

natesilver: Our editor has left the slack chat, by the way, so it’s like lord of the flies in here. I’m going to use a sentence with an oxford comma in a moment!

harry: I love the oxford comma.

clare.malone: I love it too.

natesilver: Oh wow, not me.

clare.malone: I think I write with them in most of my drafts and Micah has to change them all. I also use a different kind of em-dash formatting that he changes every time. Sorry, Micah.

micah: I’m back, and apology accepted.

harry: To get back to the point: There rarely are October surprises. Maybe there will be one of this year. But I’ll bet on no October surprise.

natesilver: Well, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you could bet on it, now would it Harry?

Video: FiveThirtyEight’s Politics Crew Analyzes The Debate

A few minutes after the debate ended Monday night, our Elections podcast crew gathered around the diet soda to discuss what it had just seen and what it might mean.

You can download the Elections podcast on iTunes, in the ESPN App or on your favorite podcast platform.

Clinton Won The Debate, Which Means She’s Likely To Gain In The Polls

Democrats woke up on Monday to a spate of bad polls for Hillary Clinton, which brought Donald Trump to perhaps his closest position yet in the Electoral College. They had reason to go to bed feeling a lot better. Clinton bested Trump in the first presidential debate according to a variety of metrics, and the odds are that she’ll gain in head-to-head polls over Trump in the coming days.

Start with a CNN poll of debate-watchers, which showed that 62 percent of voters thought Clinton won the debate compared to 27 percent for Trump — a 35-point margin. That’s the third-widest margin ever in a CNN or Gallup post-debate poll, which date back to 1984. The only more lopsided outcomes were the 1992 town hall debate between Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot — widely seen as a maestro performance by Clinton — and the first debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012, when the CNN poll showed a 42-point win for Romney and the horse-race polls moved in his favor in the following days.

Post-debate surveys like CNN’s aren’t always popular with poll mavens, in part because the universe of debate-watchers may not match the electorate overall. The voters in CNN’s poll were Democratic-leaning by a net of 15 percentage points, for instance, a considerably wider advantage than Democrats are likely to enjoy on Election Day.

But the CNN survey also historically correlates fairly well with movement in the post-election polls. Below, you’ll find a comparison between the perceived winner of the CNN/Gallup poll in debates since 1984, and how much the horse-race polls changed afterward. In 2012, for instance, Romney gained a net of 4.4 percentage points on Obama, although he eventually lost most of those gains. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, saw the polls swing by 4.1 points in his favor after the town hall debate of 1992.

The data is certainly noisy, but an emphatic win on the order of what Clinton or Romney achieved — and perhaps what Hillary Clinton achieved on Monday night — might be expected to produce a swing of 2 to 4 percentage points in horse-race polls. Even a 2-point gain would do wonders for Clinton, who would go from a fairly uncomfortable position in the Electoral College to a fairly comfortable one, and who would emerge with a 3-to-4-point lead in the popular vote.

Of course, there’s not necessarily any guarantee she’d hold on to those gains — Romney didn’t in 2012. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, and consider various aggravating and mitigating factors for Clinton in terms of her potential for an immediate post-debate bounce.

On the mitigating side, as I mentioned, CNN’s poll had a Democratic-leaning sample. (On the other hand, if Democrats were more interested in watching the debate, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing for Clinton since she’s had trouble engaging her base.) Also, a separate post-debate poll from Public Policy Polling found Clinton winning by a narrower margin, 52-40. And historically, it’s the challenging party’s candidate, and not the incumbent’s, who gains after the first debate.

But there are several other reasons to think Clinton could get a bounce, and perhaps a relatively meaningful one. In addition to the polls, a variety of post-debate indicators implied a Clinton win, including focus groups, betting markets, and the post-debate coverage on television networks. The TV coverage matters because the pundits’ reaction doesn’t always match that of voters in instant polls, and it’s sometimes the TV spin that wins out. Voters narrowly scored the first presidential debate of 2000 as a win for Al Gore, for instance, but after intense media focus on Gore’s demeanor, it was George W. Bush who eventually gained ground in polls.

This time, pundits and pollsters seem to agree on the Clinton win. It’s certainly possible that by the time you’re reading this — I’m writing at 3 a.m. — some storyline that cuts against Clinton (and which didn’t seem like a big deal on Monday night) will have emerged. But the correlation between the instant-reaction polls and the eventual effect on horse-race polls has actually grown stronger in recent election cycles, perhaps because the conventional wisdom formulates itself more quickly.

The effect of major campaign events has also tended to be magnified in 2016 because of the much larger number of undecided and third-party voters than we had in recent previous elections. Clinton got a large bounce of about 8 percentage points following her convention, for instance. There’s also an argument that Clinton is poised to rebound because the race was out of equilibrium — she’s led by about 5 points on average over the course of the campaign, as compared with just 1 or 2 points now — although it’s not clear how predictive that tendency is.

What if Clinton doesn’t improve in the polls — or they even move toward Trump? Then that ought to be scary for Democrats, obviously. While Trump’s lack of preparation could also potentially cause him problems in the second and third debates, he showed off some of his worst qualities on Monday night, appearing to be the weaker leader than Clinton and less presidential than her, according to the CNN poll. If undecided and marginal voters were willing to shrug off Trump’s performance, then perhaps they really are in the mood for the sort of change that Trump represents, his faults be damned.

But in general, Clinton has gained after the set pieces of the campaign, which reward her knack for planning and preparation, including her first primary debate against Bernie Sanders, her (anticlimactically) clinching the Democratic nomination on June 6 and 7, and the Democratic convention. Clinton doesn’t seem to have as much of an edge on her opponents in the daily free-for-all of the campaign. So if Trump and his advisors don’t like the post-debate storylines, they may try to create a distraction or two — something they’re uniquely skilled at doing.

As a warning, you should give the debate five to seven days to be fully reflected in FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts. It will take a couple of days before reliable, post-debate polls are released, and then another couple of days before the model recognizes them to be part of a trend instead of potential outliers. Also, check the dates carefully on polls released over the next few days to make sure they were conducted after the debate. Although pollsters released dozens and dozens of polls over the weekend in anticipation of the debate, there are probably a few pre-debate stragglers that will slip through.

Our Elections Podcast team recapped the debate Monday night. Listen here, or watch video of the taping below.